Don’t get me wrong, I love apples. I love Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, Braeburn, Gala, Fuji, Red Delicious, Golden Delicious and McIntosh just to name a few. I love apple pie, apple tarts, applesauce, apple cider, apple juice, apple crumb cake, baked apples, drunken apples and just about anything else apple that you can think of making with apples. If dish on the menu at the restaurant has apples in it, the odds are good I am ordering it. I just can’t bite into a crisp, ripe & juicy apple on its own.

It’s my teeth.

I wasn’t born inheriting the best teeth you could get from your parents. They had issues too. I also wasn’t always good as a kid when it came to brushing my teeth. A wet tooth brush and a pep-o-mint lifesaver tricked my mother for a while. An excessive flirtation with demon rum in my late teens and early twenties probably didn’t help things either. I went from cavities to root canals to crowns to posts to gum surgery to wire splinting. I’m actually surprised my mouth didn’t set off metal detectors in airports. Even with all that, my teeth slowly continued to fall apart until we got to where we are today and it’s not a place I really want to be.

On Monday April 23, I start a journey that I have jokingly labeled as “DENTAL HELL”. I have finally come to the realization that my teeth are beyond the patchwork fixes that have held my mouth together these past few years. It’s time for me to make wholesale changes. I am sure the work will be painful and in my own mind at times, I am sure that it will be somewhat humiliating. I just have to keep telling myself that all of the work, money & pain will be worth it in the end. I’ll be writing & updating throughout and I plan on sharing the trials & tribulations as they come. Hopefully, there will be some good stuff in there to write about as well.

So when all is said & done some 12 to 18 months from now, I will once again be able to bite into a crisp, ripe & juicy apple.